My 2024 in Books

02 January 2025

Woman Reading by Hector Caffieri

New year, new resolutions. Well – mostly. I did pretty well with working towards the various goals I set for myself last year, all save for one: getting some momentum behind putting stuff up here. So, as my only rollover resolution I’m doubling down on it. What better way then to ease myself back into this practice than by sharing with you some of the best books I read last year. After all, if my time as a freelance copywriter taught me one thing it’s that if in doubt: listicle.

My reading habits over the long 2020 of our pandemic era have shifted pretty markedly. I entered lockdown as a die hard non-fiction reader that struggled with the suspicion that any time spent reading fiction was potential knowledge stolen. That’s stupid, of course, not to mention deeply wrong lol.

In aiming to correct that, I’ve been reading more and more fiction with each passing year and it has been magnificent. After all, why resort to yet another cancelled Netflix series when there’s still all the great literature of humanity to plunder.

It’s with that in mind that I was pleased and not a little surprised to realise that this was probably the first year of my adult life in which I had read more fiction than nonfiction, and my god has it been worth it.

So, in no possible order here’s a few I strongly commend to your attention:

Spiritual Cleansing: A Handbook of Psychic Protection by Draja Mickaharic

This modern classic of warding and protection does exactly what it says on the tin. It offers extremely pragmatic and accessible techniques for clearing and cleansing both yourself and your home. I particularly like that Mickaharic provides you with 2-3 options for every situation, ranging in severity from simple fixes to more intensive ritual protocols so you can scale your response to the needs of the moment. There’s sections on teas, baths, incense, prayers and more. It’s a fantastic repository of wisdom rooted in Balkan folk magic, embellished and refined by Mickaharic’s decades of experience.

The City & The City by China Miéville

I found this in a charity shop right off the back of reading another of Miéville’s, The Last Days of New Paris. That was a pretty enjoyable read, but didn’t prepare me at all for The City & The City. Tonally it very intentionally resides within the world of interwar hardboiled detective fiction that gave rise to film noir on the silver screen, all venetian blinds and pithy cynicism.

But it takes the chiaroscuro of those stories to a reality-breaking extreme, all against a backdrop of a fictional eastern European city (or two, or uh..). So entertaining, so unexpected and a brilliant exploration of the fuzzy philosophical edges of perception.

Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim

Before reading this I was only very vaguely aware of Karl Friedrich Alfred Heinrich Ferdinand Maria Graf Eckbrecht von Dürckheim-Montmartin (mate). A German aristocrat sent to Japan as a full-fledged Nazi emissary, he seemingly underwelt a profound transformation during post-war allied imprisonment to emerge as a teacher on Zen and an early advocate of existential and transpersonal psychology. Pretty wild stuff.

This book, as the name conveys, is principally to do with the Hara, the energetic centre of the body that corresponds roughly with our centre of gravity. Anyone who has done martial arts or dabbled with Qigong, or east Asian traditions of meditation will at least be intuitively aware of it.

This work was a fascinating exploration of the Hara shows up across a wide array of cultural contexts and intersects with many areas of human life and activity. I was completely blown away by it honestly. The subtlety and beauty of thought presented here is completely sublime. One of those that I knew immediately upon reading I’d be returning to again and again for the rest of my life.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

I’ve been trying to read The Magic Mountain for years at this point but all the translations I would run across in charity shops were the famously poor Lowe-Porter editions. Eventually I got myself the much better regarded Woods translation and proceeded to wade into the 700+ pages of existential delirium that comprise this supremely weird book.

me after reading the magic mountain

It’s been six months since I read it now and I’m still kinda baffled by it. What I do know is that I am a different person now than who I was at its outset. As to the quality of that difference, it has something to do with a new appreciation for my mortality and the vicissitudes of time. If that sounds like a recommendation to you, try it out lol. I think I think this book is fucking awesome, but I’ll get back to you in seven years.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Nothing – no book, article, show, thread, podcast, documentary, conversation or movie has come anywhere close to placing the events of the past few years into an intelligible context for me like Naomi Klein’s stunning exploration of the covid era, our post-truth moment and the rise of political populism. Vital!

Mister Timeless Blyth by Alan Spence

R.H. Blyth has always been something of an enigmatic figure for me. I’ve read plenty of his haiku translations, and know just how big an impact he had on that whole generation of Western popularisers of Zen that came after him such as Alan Watts and Gary Snyder. But I knew little about his character and life before stumbling upon this title in a library.

Reginald Horace Blyth (1898–1964)

It’s a posthumous biographical novel by Scottish poet Alan Spence told from Blyth’s perspective. Assembled from his many letters and journals, as well as through the testimony of his surviving friends and family, it’s a real labour of love that brings this quietly influential figure vividly to life. I got a real sense for his humour, innate compassion and deep abiding love both for his adoptive homeland of Japan and for the dharma. Really nice.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

Recency bias naturally plays havoc with our ability to judge the merit or impact of things we suppose we enjoyed. With that said by way of disclaimer, I think this is probably now my favourite book? This or Moby-Dick – clearly I have a thing for Hermans.

If you’re in any way attracted by the allure of scholarly pursuits, or of the monastic life, The Glass Bead Game will read you to shit. It’s difficult to put into words why I love it so much – it’s something to do with the way it holds up its central ideas to the light and delicately examines them from all angles. This book is just so beautiful, and so much about beauty. It’s also about how we mediate reality and build little webs to shield ourselves from the pain of living. IT’S SO GOOD.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

You know when you’re reading something, and you can’t really tell whether you get it or not – or even whether you like it? That’s totally what happened to me with this one. I thought it was trying to be one thing and kinda failing to hit the mark, until about half way through when I realised it was an altogether stranger fruit than I was allowing it to be.

I feel that Midnight’s Children is a story about a dream of Post-Independence India, and of the hundreds of millions of people dreaming it. I went looking for something tangible and finite, but I found myself caught in the jewels of Indra’s net. I absolutely adored this one by the time I finished it.